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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html

This is a long article that will no doubt be referred to throughout the 
rest of the campaign. It is titled Without A Doubt, and is written by Ron 
Suskind. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury 
official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush 
wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 
3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the 
same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between 
modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and 
religion.

''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone 
off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's 
always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he 
thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and 
self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for 
traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: 
''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the 
Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They 
can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He 
understands them, because he's just like them. . . .